Printed documents have been a primary source of communication for many centuries. Printed documents have been used widely across different domains such as news reporting, advertisements, office environments (large and small offices alike) and so on. The last decade has witnessed an explosion in the popularity of hand-held mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, smart phones and more recently tablet devices. The ubiquitous nature of print media and the ever increasing popularity of the mobile hand-held devices have led to a new genre of applications based on augmented reality.
Augmented reality (or AR) is a view of a physical world where some elements of the physical reality are augmented by computer generated inputs such as sound, graphics and so on. Due to vast improvements in processing power and other capabilities, hand held devices are now able to host augmented reality applications. The host augmented reality applications enable an end-user to retrieve additional information related to a captured image of a real world object using a camera connected to a device (e.g. a camera phone) and augment the additional information to the real world object. Such a real-world object may be a natural image in a document, a piece of textual information, a physical object such as a printer and so on.
Conventional augmented reality methods have focused on sufficiently augmenting an object whereby, the more the system could augment the object, the better the augmented reality was deemed. However, the increase in microprocessor speed, memory capacity, data transfer bandwidth, and software functionality have enabled devices, such as AR glasses, the capacity to process and visualise greater virtual content; greater in size, complexity and amount. While such augmented reality can add information to the physical world, too much information can cause confusion and lessen a user's experience.